Proto-Semitic phonology
The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic (PS) was originally based primarily on Arabic, whose phonology and morphology (particularly in Classical Arabic) is extremely conservative, and which preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes. Thus, the phonemic inventory of reconstructed Proto-Semitic is very similar to that of Arabic, with only one phoneme fewer in Arabic than in reconstructed Proto-Semitic, with s and š merging into Arabic and ś becoming Arabic . As such, Proto-Semitic is generally reconstructed as having the following phonemes (as usually transcribed in Semitology): Inventory The fricatives *s *z *ṣ *ś *ṣ́ *ṱ may also be interpreted as affricates ( ), as is discussed below. The Proto-Semitic consonant system is based on triads of related voiceless, voiced and "emphatic" consonants. Five such triads are reconstructed in Proto-Semitic: *Dental stops *d *t *ṭ *Velar stops *g *k *ḳ (normally written *g *k *q) *Dental sibilants *z *s *ṣ *Interdental (written *ḏ *ṯ *ṱ) *Lateral (normally written *l *ś *ṣ́) The probable phonetic realization of most consonants is straightforward and is indicated in the table with the IPA. Two subsets of consonants, however, deserve further comment. Emphatics The sounds notated here as "emphatic" occur in nearly all Semitic languages as well as in most other Afroasiatic languages, and they are generally reconstructed as glottalized in Proto-Semitic.That explains the lack of voicing distinction in the emphatic series, which would be unnecessary if the emphatics were pharyngealized.Bomhard, A. R., & Hopper, P. J. (1984). Toward proto-nostratic : A new approach to the comparison of proto-indo-european and proto afroasiatic. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com (p. 136): "Cantineau (1952:91-94), Martinet (19751959:238, Steiner (1977:155)" An emphatic labial *ṗ occurs in some Semitic languages, but it is unclear whether it was a phoneme in Proto-Semitic. *Hebrew developed an emphatic labial phoneme ṗ'' to represent unaspirated in Iranian and Greek.Hetzron 1997, p. 147. *Ge'ez is unique among Semitic languages for contrasting all three of , , and . While and occur mostly in loanwords (especially from Greek), there are many other occurrences whose origin is less clear (such as ''hepʼä 'strike', häppälä 'wash clothes').Woodard 2008, p. 219. Fricatives The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic has nine fricative sounds that are reflected usually as sibilants in later languages, but whether all were already sibilants in Proto-Semitic is debated: *Two voiced fricatives that eventually became, for example, for both in Hebrew, but and in Arabic, respectively *Four voiceless fricatives ** ( ) that became in Hebrew but in Arabic ** ( ) that became in Hebrew but in Arabic ** ( ) that became (transcribed ś'') in Hebrew but in Arabic ** ( ) that became in both Hebrew and Arabic *Three emphatic fricatives ( ) The precise sound of the Proto-Semitic fricatives, notably of , , and , remains a perplexing problem, and there are various systems of notation to describe them. The notation given here is traditional and is based on their pronunciation in Hebrew, which has traditionally been extrapolated to Proto-Semitic. The notation , , is found primarily in the literature on Old South Arabian, but more recently, it has been used by some authors to discus Proto-Semitic to express a noncommittal view of the pronunciation of the sounds. However, the older transcription remains predominant in most literature, often even among scholars who either disagree with the traditional interpretation or remain noncommittal.For an example of an author using the traditional symbols but subscribing to the new sound values, see Hackett, Joe Ann. 2008. Phoenician and Punic. ''The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (ed. Roger D. Woodard). Likewise, Huehnengard, John and Christopher Woods. 2008. Akkadian and Eblaite. The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Aksum (ed. Roger D. Woodard). p. 96: "Similarly, there was a triad of affricates, voiced ( ) voiceless ( ), and emphatic ( }}). These became fricatives in later dialects; the voiceless member of this later, fricative set was pronounced s in Babylonian, but š in Assyrian, while the reflex of Proto-Semitic , which was probably simple s originally, continued to be pronounced as such in Assyrian, but as š in Babylonian." Similarly, an author remaining undecided regarding the sound values of the sibilants will also use the conventional symbols, for example, Greenberg, Joseph, The Patterning of Root Morphemes in Semitic. 1990. p. 379. On language: selected writings of Joseph H. Greenberg. Ed. Keith M. Denning and Suzanne Kemme: "There is great uncertainty regarding the phonetic values of s'', ''ś, and š'' in Proto-Semitic. I simply use them here as conventional transcriptions of the three sibilants corresponding to the sounds indicated by ''samekh, śin, and šin respectively in Hebrew orthography." The traditional view, as expressed in the conventional transcription and still maintained by some of the authors in the fieldLipiński, Edward. 2000. Semitic languages: outline of a comparative grammar. e.g. the tables on p.113, p.131; also p.133: "Common Semitic or Proto-Semitic has a voiceless fricative prepalatal or palato-alevolar š'', i.e. ...", p.129 ff.Macdonald, M.C.A. 2008. Ancient North Arabian. In: The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (ed. Roger D. Woodard). p. 190.Blau, Joshua (2010). Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. p. 25–40. is that was a Voiceless postalveolar fricative ( ), was a voiceless alveolar sibilant ( ) and was a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative ( ). Accordingly, is seen as an emphatic version of ( ) as a voiced version of it ( ) and as an emphatic version of ( ). The reconstruction of as lateral fricatives (or affricates) is certain although few modern languages preserve the sounds. The pronunciation of as is still maintained in the Modern South Arabian languages (such as Mehri), and evidence of a former lateral pronunciation is evident in a number of other languages. For example, Biblical Hebrew ''baśam was borrowed into Ancient Greek as balsamon (hence English "balsam"), and the 8th-century Arab grammarian Sībawayh explicitly described the Arabic descendant of , now pronounced in the standard pronunciation or in Bedouin-influenced dialects, as a pharyngealized voiced lateral fricative . (Compare Spanish alcalde, from Andalusian Arabic al-qāḍī "judge".) The primary disagreements concern whether the sounds were actually fricatives in Proto-Semitic or whether some were affricates and whether the sound designated was pronounced (or similar) in Proto-Semitic, as the traditional view posits, or had the value of . The issue of the nature of the "emphatic" consonants, discussed above, is partly related (but partly orthogonal) to the issues here as well. With respect to the traditional view, there are two dimensions of "minimal" and "maximal" modifications made: #In how many sounds are taken to be affricates. The "minimal affricate" position takes only the emphatic as an affricate . The "maximal affricate" position additionally posits that were actually affricates while was actually a simple fricative .For example, Huehnengard, John. 2008. Afro-Asiatic. In: The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (ed. Roger D. Woodard). P.229–231 #In whether to extend the affricate interpretation to the interdentals and laterals. The "minimal extension" position assumes that only the sibilants were affricates, and the other "fricatives" were in fact all fricatives, but the maximal update extends the same interpretation to the other sounds. Typically, that means that the "minimal affricate, maximal extension" position takes all and only the emphatics are taken as affricates: emphatic were . The "maximal affricate, maximal extension" position assumes not only the "maximal affricate" position for sibilants but also that non-emphatic were actually affricates. Affricates in Proto-Semitic were proposed early on but met little acceptance until the work of Alice Faber (1981) who challenged the older approach. The Semitic languages that have survived often have fricatives for these consonants. However, Ethiopic languages and Modern Hebrew, in many reading traditions, have an affricate for . The evidence for the various affricate interpretations of the sibilants is direct evidence from transcriptions and structural evidence. However, the evidence for the "maximal extension" positions that extend affricate interpretations to non-sibilant "fricatives" is largely structural because of both the relative rarity of the interdentals and lateral obstruents among the attested Semitic language and the even-greater rarity of such sounds among the various languages in which Semitic words were transcribed. As a result, even when the sounds were transcribed, the resulting transcriptions may be difficult to interpret clearly. The narrowest affricate view (only was an affricate ) is the most accepted one.Kogan, Leonid (2011). "Proto-Semitic Phonetics and Phonology". In Semitic languages: an international handbook, Stefan Weninger, ed. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. P. 62.According to Kogan "Proto-Semitic Phonetics and Phonology" (2011), Steiner 1982a is the "classic exposition" (p. 62). The affricate pronunciation is directly attested in the modern Ethiopic languages and Modern Hebrew, as mentioned above, but also in ancient transcriptions of numerous Semitic languages in various other languages: *Transcriptions of Ge'ez from the period of the Axumite Kingdom (early centuries AD): ṣəyāmo rendered as Greek τζιαμω tziamō. *The Hebrew reading tradition of as clearly goes back at least to medieval times, as shown by the use of Hebrew ( ) to represent affricates in early New Persian, Old Osmanli Turkic, Middle High German etc. Similarly, Old French c'' was used to transliterate : Hebrew '' "righteousness" and "land (of Israel)" were written cedek, arec. *There is also evidence of an affricate in Ancient Hebrew and Phoenician . Punic was often transcribed as ts or t'' in Latin and Greek or occasionally Greek ''ks; correspondingly, Egyptian names and loanwords in Hebrew and Phoenician use to represent the Egyptian palatal affricate ḏ'' (conventionally described as voiced but possibly instead an unvoiced ejective ).Kogan, (2011), p. 63. *Aramaic and Syriac had an affricated realization of until some point, as is seen in Classical Armenian loanwords: Aramaic 'bundle, bunch' → Classical Armenian ''crar . The "maximal affricate" view, applied only to sibilants, also has transcriptional evidence. According to Kogan, the affricate interpretation of Akkadian is generally accepted.Kogan (2011), p. 66. *Akkadian cuneiform, as adapted for writing various other languages, used the signs to represent affricates. Examples include /ts/ in Hittite,Dolgopolsky 1999, p. 32. Egyptian affricate in the Amarna letters and the Old Iranian affricates in Elamite.Kogan (2011), p. 67. *Egyptian transcriptions of early Canaanite words with use affricates ( for , ).Kogan (2011), pp. 67-68. *West Semitic loanwords in the "older stratum" of Armenian reflect as affricates , .Dolgopolsky 1999, p. 33. *Greek borrowing of Phoenician �� to represent /s/ (compare Greek Σ), and �� to represent (compare Greek Ξ) is difficult to explain if then had the value in Phoenician, but it is quite easy to explain if it actually had the value (even more so if had the value ).Kogan (2011), p. 69. *Similarly, Phoenician uses �� to represent sibilant fricatives in other languages rather than �� until the mid-3rd century BC, which has been taken by Friedrich/Röllig 1999 (pp. 27–28)Quoted in Kogan (2011), p. 68. as evidence of an affricate pronunciation in Phoenician until then. On the other hand, Egyptian starts using s'' in place of earlier '' to represent Canaanite s'' around 1000 BC. As a result, KoganKogan (2011), p. 68. assumes a much earlier loss of affricates in Phoenician, and he assumes that the foreign sibilant fricatives in question had a sound closer to than . (A similar interpretation for at least Latin ''s has been proposed by various linguists based on evidence of similar pronunciations of written s'' in a number of early medieval Romance languages; a technical term for this "intermediate" sibilant is voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant.) There is also a good deal of internal evidence in early Akkadian for affricate realizations of . Examples are that underlying || || were realized as ''ss, which is more natural if the law was phonetically || || → , and that shift to before , which is more naturally interpreted as deaffrication. Evidence for as also exists but is somewhat less clear. It has been suggested that it is cross-linguistically rare for languages with a single sibilant fricative to have as the sound and that is more likely. Similarly, the use of Phoenician �� , as the source of Greek Σ s'', seems easiest to explain if the phoneme had the sound of at the time. The occurrence of for in a number of separate modern Semitic languages (such as Neo-Aramaic, Modern South Arabian, most Biblical Hebrew reading traditions) and Old Babylonian Akkadian is then suggested to result from a push-type chain shift, and the change from to "pushes" out of the way to in the languages in question, and a merger of the two to occurs in various other languages such as Arabic and Ethiopian Semitic. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the initial merged ''s in Arabic was actually a "hissing-hushing sibilant",Kogan (2011), p. 70, quoting Martinet 1953 p. 73 and Murtonen 1966 p. 138. presumably something like (or a "retracted sibilant"), which did not become until later. That would suggest a value closer to (or a "retracted sibilant") or for Proto-Semitic since and would almost certainly merge directly to s. Furthermore, there is various evidence to suggest that the sound for existed while was still .Kogan (2011), p. 70. Examples are the Southern Old Babylonian form of Akkadian, which evidently had along with as well as Egyptian transcriptions of early Canaanite words in which are rendered as . (ṯ'' is an affricate and the consensus interpretation of ''š is , as in Modern Coptic.) Diem (1974) suggested that the Canaanite sound change of → would be more natural if *š was than if it was . However, Kogan argues that, because was at the time, the change from to is the most likely merger, regardless of the exact pronunciation of while the shift was underway.Kogan (2011), pp. 92-93. Evidence for the affricate nature of the non-sibilants is based mostly on internal considerations. Ejective fricatives are quite rare cross-linguistically, and when a language has such sounds, it nearly always has so if was actually affricate , it would be extremely unusual if was fricative rather than affricate . According to Rodinson (1981) and Weninger (1998), the Greek placename Mátlia, with tl used to render Ge'ez ḍ'' (Proto-Semitic ''*ṣ́), is "clear proof" that this sound was affricated in Ge'ez and quite possibly in Proto-Semitic as well.Kogan (2011), p. 80. The evidence for the most maximal interpretation, with all the interdentals and lateral obstruents being affricates, appears to be mostly structural: the system would be more symmetric if reconstructed that way. The shift of to h occurred in most Semitic languages (other than Akkadian, Minaian, Qatabanian) in grammatical and pronominal morphemes, and it is unclear whether reduction of began in a daughter proto-language or in Proto-Semitic itself. Some thus suggest that weakened may have been a separate phoneme in Proto-Semitic.Dolgopolsky 1999, pp. 19, 69-70 Notes References External links * Category:Language phonologies